Modern trends in building design often desire making rooftop surfaces into useable and even public spaces. Since skylights are often already specified for an intended building design, once the roof becomes a walkway, the skylight must be made “walkable”. Making a walkable skylight means designing them to support the additional loading potential of numerous people walking and standing upon them. At a minimum, making a skylight walkable means that several layers of thick glass will be used.
Edge lighting of glass or acrylic panels has become a popular way to accent interior space designs in modern structures. Edge lighting uses the principle of internal reflection to turn a translucent or transparent panel into a diffuse light source. Standard window framing configurations, however, make no provision for utilizing edge lighting in structural windows and skylights.
Traditionally skylights provide illumination from sunlight through standard roofing structures and are only designed to support their own weight and expected additional loading from snow. Generally they were not intended, and thus not designed, to support the weight of one or more persons walking upon them.
Further complicating the design of a walkable skylight, over the past several decades, nearly all new windows in residential and commercial buildings have more than one pane of glass and some type of thermally insulative structure or insulating glass unit (IGU). Typically they involve panes of glass separated by a thermal break spacer and sometimes involve evacuating the space in between or filling it with a noble gas such as argon or krypton. As these structures are typically not load-bearing, the materials used to fabricate such structures are generally lightweight and can be produced off-site in a manufacturing facility. In particular, the spacer typically employed consists of a tubular structure, made of thin metal, and often containing a desiccant material for absorbing moisture present in the air between the glass panels.
Unfortunately, multiple panels of thick heavy glass, and the weight of people walking thereupon, can be too much for the flimsy spacers currently available. It is inevitable that they will ultimately fail. Thus, because of the limitations in the glass spacers currently available, while architects desire the aesthetics and functionality of walkable skylight units, such aspirations must compete with the goal of creating an energy efficient building.
In addition, providing walkable surfaces on a rooftop must also consider other rooftop design constraints, such as providing adequate drainage. Accordingly, good drainage usually indicates providing sloped surfaces. Walking surfaces, on the other hand, should be flat.
Pedestal pavers provide an option by allowing an underlying roof surface to be flat, while paving stones (or “pavers”) provide a flat walking surface. This is accomplished by a network of pedestals that each support a paving stone. The pedestals are individually adjustable in height to accommodate a sloping roof surface while keeping the paving stones level with each other.
While these units may be suitable for the particular purpose employed, or for general use, they would not be as suitable for the purposes of the present disclosure as disclosed hereafter.
In the present disclosure, where a document, act or item of knowledge is referred to or discussed, this reference or discussion is not an admission that the document, act or item of knowledge or any combination thereof was at the priority date, publicly available, known to the public, part of common general knowledge or otherwise constitutes prior art under the applicable statutory provisions; or is known to be relevant to an attempt to solve any problem with which the present disclosure is concerned.
While certain aspects of conventional technologies have been discussed to facilitate the present disclosure, no technical aspects are disclaimed and it is contemplated that the claims may encompass one or more of the conventional technical aspects discussed herein.